Posts Tagged ‘Delta 4’

A Russian Soyuz rocket is set for liftoff at 0202:50 UTC Saturday (7:02:50 PM Phoenix time Friday) from the Guiana Space Center with the sharp-eyed Pleiades 1B Earth observation satellite to collect high-resolution imagery for French and European security services. It will join the Pleiades 1A satellite launched in December 2011, forming a two-spacecraft constellation placing every part of Earth in range of their cameras each day.

Stratolaunch Systems has turned to Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., to keep the world’s largest air-launch-to-orbit system on track for a 2017 test flight. Stratolaunch and SpaceX parted ways was because SpaceX, decided it did not want to disrupt its Hawthorne, Calif., assembly line to accommodate the design changes required to turn its nine-engine, liquid-fueled Falcon 9 into a four- or five-engine air-launched booster.

29 November

Curiosity on Mars: Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover’s full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds — carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

South Korean engineers scrubbed Thursday a second attempt to launch a rocket, citing technical problems with the rocket’s second stage. The Korea Space Launch Vehicle (KSLV)-1 rocket, also known as Naro-1, was to launch from South Korea’s launch site, the Naro Space Center, at 2 am EST (0700 GMT, 4 pm local time) Thursday, but the countdown was halted 17 minutes before the scheduled liftoff time.

Scientists Thursday announced new evidence from the MESSENGER spacecraft that Mercury, the planet orbiting nearest the Sun, hosts massive caches of ice and revealed new information on how water reached our solar system’s inner planets.

28 November

A Long March 3B rocket launched a Chinese communications satellite that will be used, in part, by a Sri Lankan company. The rocket lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 3:13 AM Phoenix time (1013 UTC) Tuesday and placed the Chinasat-12 satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The satellite, a Spacebus 4000 model built by Thales Alenia Space, weighed approximately 5,000 kilograms at launch and carries a payload of C- and Ku-band transponders.

27 November

The BBC discusses the US Air Force X-37B, which is currently scheduled for launch on 11 December.

Capt. Scott Kelly, a veteran astronaut, will set the record for the longest single space mission for an American, NASA announced Monday. Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will embark on a one-year mission to the International Space Station in 2015. The duo will help scientists explore the effects of living in space on the human body, NASA said. They will provide information regarding health and crew performance and help with determining and validating risk-reduction measures. All of this can help contribute to planning for missions to other celestial worlds, such as an asteroid or Mars.

It is not every day that astronauts can claim to return to Earth with a new species of life. But when the astronauts on ESA’s CAVES underground training course returned to the surface they were carrying a special type of woodlouse.

25 November

A Long March 4C rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 11:06 pm EST Saturday (0406 GMT, 12:06 pm Sunday Beijing time) and placed the Yaogan 16 satellite into orbit. The satellite will be used for a variety of earth sciences and disaster management applications.

24 November

Whatever Curiosity has found in the way of organic molecules on Mars, Stuart Clark at the Guardian observes that “… it is not evidence for life on Mars. It can’t be. Curiosity is not designed to look for life. Grotzinger has stated this himself.”

Space fans anticipate news of organic molecules from the Mars Curiosity rover, which were cryptically teased by the mission’s chief scientist, John Grotzinger. Grotzinger has refused to elaborate, pointing New Scientist, and other journalists, to a presentation scheduled for the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, which begins on 3 December.

Member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canada met in Naples, Italy, to determine the space agenda and the budget for the next five years. The discussed projects include ExoMars rover, Ariane 5 rocket modernization and NASA’s new manned Orion multipurpose crew vehicle (MPCV), as well as some 12bn euros’ worth of activities.

23 November

Astronomers observing a stellar occultation by the dwarf planet Makemake found no evidence of an atmosphere around the distant, icy world. Astronomers observed the occultation using three telescopes at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile in April 2011 as the dwarf planet, about two-thirds the size of Pluto, passed in front of a distant star. The star abruptly disappeared and then reappeared, a telltale sign that there is no atmosphere around the dwarf planet.

22 November

The European Space Agency got the green light on 21 November to push ahead with a new generation of launchers and take its first foray into manned spacecraft, with a €10 billion ($12.9 billion) budget agreement for the next five years. Meeting in Naples, ministers in charge of space and science from the governments of the space agency’s 20 member states broadly signed up to ESA proposals to improve its Ariane 5 heavy launcher, begin design of a successor – Ariane 6 – and design and build a service module for NASA’s multi-purpose crew vehicle (MPCV) as part of ESA’s “barter arrangement” to the running costs of the International Space Station.

SpaceX intends to build a methane/liquid oxygen (Lox) engine, said founder Elon Musk, in a shift away from the highly refined kerosene rocket propellant (RP-1) that has powered the company’s previous engines. Speaking at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, SpaceX chief executive and lead rocket engineer Musk said Lox and methane would be SpaceX’s propellants of choice on a mission to Mars, which has long been his stated goal.

21 November

The European Space Agency (ESA) have announced they will inform NASA they are ready to build an ATV derived Service Module for Orion, to be ready for the first launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) in 2017. The announcement came after the UK stepped up with additional funding, marking the country’s first real human BEO commitment.

A Proton rocket successfully launched an American communications satellite on the same day that the company that markets the Proton commercially replaced its president. The Proton M rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1:31 pm EST Tuesday (1831 GMT Tuesday, 12:31 am local time Wednesday). Its Breeze M upper stage released the EchoStar 16 satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit 9 hours and 12 minutes after liftoff. The satellite, a Space Systems/Loral 1300-series satellite, weighed 6,683 kilograms at launch and carries 36 Ku-band transponders.

Astronomers announced Monday they had directly imaged a massive extrasolar planet orbiting another star. Kappa Andromedae b has a mass 12.8 times that of Jupiter, placing it near the dividing line between planet and brown dwarf; astronomers call the world a “super-Jupiter” to cover both possibilities.

19 November

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying three returning International Space Station crewmembers safely landed early Monday in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft undocked from the ISS at 5:26 pm EST (2226 GMT) Sunday and landed north of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, at 6:56 pm Phoenix time Sunday (0156 UTC, 7:56 am local time Monday). On board the Soyuz were NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, who spent 127 days in space.

A Long March rocket launched a Chinese environmental monitoring satellite on Monday. The Long March 2C rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center at 5:53 pm EST Sunday (2253 GMT Sunday, 6:53 am Beijing time Monday) and placed the Huanjing-1C into a sun-synchronous orbit.

18 November

Aviation Week discusses the computer anomalies experienced by the SpaceX Dragon on the recent CRS1 mission to the International Space Station.

The Russian replacement for a defective part in South Korea’s space rocket that postponed its launch last month has arrived. A new rubber seal in the connector between the rocket and its launch pad arrived in Seoul on Saturday and was moved to the Naro Space Center, some 480 kilometers south of Seoul. The defect in the part was believed to be the main cause of the failure of planned launch of the Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 (KSLV-1) last month.

17 November

Three international and commercial customers slated to fly satellites on Falcon 9 rockets next year are standing by SpaceX as the company probes a mysterious engine problem and prepares to debut an upgraded launcher.

16 November

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, which has spent the last several weeks working at a single location on the Martian surface, will soon be on the move again, project scientists said Thursday. The rover has been stopped for over a month by a sand dune, collecting soil samples while also performing other observations. Project scientists said at a briefing Thursday that the rover would be on the move again in the next few days

Astronomers announced Wednesday the discovery of a “homeless” planet 100 light-years away not orbiting any star. Astronomers detected the object, designated CFBDSIR2149, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, with followup observations made by ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The object four to seven times as massive as Jupiter and is part of a group of young stars called the AB Doradus Moving Group, but is not orbiting any of those stars.

14 November

NASA is marking two milestones in the search for planets like Earth; the successful completion of the Kepler Space Telescope’s 3 1/2- year prime mission and the beginning of an extended mission that could last as long as four years.

A Soyuz-2-1a/Fregat rocket has launched a communications satellite for the Russian military on Wednesday. The rocket, carrying the latest Meridian spacecraft, lifted off from pad 43/4 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, at 11:42 UTC on Wednesday. Spacecraft separation was successfully carried out at 14:00 UTC.

13 November

NASA Television will provide live coverage as three of the crew members on the International Space Station come back to Earth Sunday, 18 November. Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams of NASA, Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Russian Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko will undock their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft from the station, heading for a pre-dawn landing in Kazakhstan, northeast of the remote town of Arkalyk at 7:53 p.m. CST (7:53 a.m. Kazakhstan time on Nov. 19).

12 November

The NASA Mars Odyssey orbiter has resumed duty after switching to a set of redundant equipment, including a main computer, that had not been used since before the spacecraft’s 2001 launch. Odyssey relayed data to Earth late Sunday that it received from NASA’s Opportunity rover on Mars using the orbiter’s fresh “B-side” radio for UHF (ultra-high frequency) communications. In plans for this week are relay opportunities for the newest Mars rover, Curiosity, and resumption of Odyssey’s own scientific observations.

11 November

Specialists at the Plesetsk space centre in the Arkhangelsk region completed erecting the Soyuz-2.1a launcher with the Fregat upper stage carrying the Meridian spacecraft. Launch of Soyuz-2.1a with the Meridian spacecraft is due on November 14.

10 November

An Ariane 5 rocket successfully launched a pair of commercial communications satellites on Saturday. The Ariane 5 ECA lifted off from the spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 4:05 pm EST (2105 GMT) Saturday, one day later than planned because of high upper-level winds on Friday. The Ariane 5 placed into geosynchronous transfer orbit the Eutelsat 21B and Star One C3 satellites about a half-hour after launch.

China plans to launch its next manned space mission in June of 2013. The three-person crew could be made up of a woman and two men.

9 November

Rocket engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne announced this week it was laying off 100 people because of uncertainty in the space industry. About three-quarters of the layoffs are taking place at two facilities in southern California. Rocketdyne cited the “uncertain future of the space industry and current economic conditions” as the reasons for the layoffs. Rocketdyne, which manufactured the Space Shuttle Maine Engine and builds the RS-68 engine for the Delta 4, is in the process of being sold to GenCorp, the parent company of rival engine manufacturer Aerojet.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency figures smaller is better: Striving for cheaper and more frequent launches, JAXA has set its sights on firing its new Epsilon small rocket into space from the Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima next August or September.

Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) — a commercial space advocate and global warming skeptic — announced Nov. 8 his intentions to vie for the chairmanship of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in the 113th Congress that convenes in January.

8 November

Astronomers announced Wednesday the discovery of a “super-Earth” extrasolar planet within the habitable zone of a nearby star. Astronomers said the planet, one of six known to orbit the star HD 40307, has a mass at least seven times that of the Earth and orbits the star at a distance similar to the Earth’s distance from the Sun. HD 40307 is a K-class star about 42 light-years from the Sun.

The Russian government will hold a special conference November 26 on ways of reorganizing the space agency Roscosmos, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who supervises the defense-industrial complex, has said. He will make a report on the issue.

The U.S. Air Force is not close to finding a root cause of a recent low-thrust problem in an RL10 upper stage engine made by Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, and the service may further delay launch of its Orbital Test Vehicle-3 mission as well as NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System K spacecraft.

7 November

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot only looks constant. In the late 1800s the behemoth storm looked more like a Great Red Sausage, stretching about 40,000 kilometers. Today, it is only 20,000 kilometers wide. Could it melt away entirely?

6 November

Wired magazine discusses the plans of SpaceX for controlled landing of the Falcon 9 first stage, and shows video of the 10 story tall Grasshopper test vehicle flight.

5 November

Scientists working on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover said Friday that initial measurements of the Martian atmosphere failed to turn up any evidence of methane, a constituent detected in some previous observations that could be linked to life. a laser spectrometer on Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars instrument measured the composition of the atmosphere at the Gale Crater landing site, putting an upper limit of just a few parts per billion on any methane in the atmosphere there.

United Launch Alliance plans to blast a U.S. Air Force X-37B space plane into orbit 27 November, pushing back the launch of the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) to complete investigating a rocket engine anomaly that occurred during an Oct. 4 mission.

2 November

1 November

Mark Kelly, commander of the space shuttle Endeavor on its last mission to the International Space Station, discusses the Obama space policy and support for NASA.

US astronaut Sunita Williams and her Japanese colleague Akihiko Hoshide will make a spacewalk on Thursday outside the International Space Station (ISS) to isolate and repair an ammonia leak.

Light from the very first stars in the universe has been measured – and there is less of it than previously thought. The discovery should help us better understand how the hot haze of hydrogen that existed shortly after the big bang transformed into the complex web of stars and galaxies we see today.

Data from NASA’s Dawn mission show that a form of weathering that occurs on the moon and other airless bodies we’ve visited in the inner solar system does not alter Vesta’s outermost layer in the same way. Carbon-rich asteroids have also been splattering dark material on Vesta’s surface over a long span of the body’s history. The results are described in two papers released today in the journal Nature.

Deep Space Antenna 3 (DSA 3), one of the world’s most sophisticated satellite tracking stations is nearing inauguration in Malargüe, Argentina, 1000 km west of Buenos Aires. The new station will ensure reliable communications with missions voyaging hundreds of millions of kilometres into our Solar System.

30 October

The third and final launch attempt of a homegrown South Korean space rocket, dubbed the Naro, has been rescheduled beginning 9 November. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology on Monday said more detailed analysis lies ahead of the defect that caused the launch to be postponed last week. The new launch attempt will also not be possible any earlier since the international community needs to be informed of the schedule. The launch window could be any time between the 9th and 24th of November.

Hawthorne will be able to hold onto its most prominent business for at least the next decade under a new deal with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. SpaceX agreed to stay in its 1-million-square-foot headquarters building through 2022 as long as the city reduces certain taxes on the business as promised.

The Taurid meteors, sometimes called the “Halloween fireballs,” show up each year between mid-October and mid-November, but Nov. 5 to 12 will likely be the best time to look for them this year, based on their peak of activity and the effect of moonlight on viewing conditions.

Be afraid – but not too afraid. It’s true that at some point, if we don’t take steps to prevent it, a big dumb object is going to smash into the Earth so hard that civilization as we know it will be seriously inconvenienced, or even wiped out (see? No reason for too much fear). But the odds are that such a cataclysm lies way, way in the future. Still, you never know…

In a story on Saturday, Allison Gatlin of the Antelope Valley Press quotes Scaled Composites Executive Vice President Kevin Mickey as saying that powered flights of SpaceShipTwo will begin next year. Virgin Galactic officials have said they hoped to begin powered flights by the end of this year. The powered flights will be preceded by un-powered glide tests of SpaceShipTwo that will begin later this year. These will be the first flights of the eight-person space plane after it has been fully fitted with its hybrid propulsion system.

28 October

The Dragon space craft unberthed at 4:20 AM Phoenix time (1120 UTC), released from the International Space Station’s SSRMS arm at 6:28 AM (1328 UTC) and left the vicinity of the ISS shortly thereafter. The SpaceX craft splashed down 220 miles off the coast of Baja California at 12:22 PDT (1922 UTC).

27 October

A Long March rocket placed the latest in a series of navigation satellites into orbit on Thursday. The Long March 3C rocket lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 11:33 am EDT (1533 GMT, 11:33 pm Beijing time) Thursday and placed a Beidou satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit.

26 October

The planned launch of a homegrown South Korean space rocket has been put on hold at the last minute when a technical fault was detected. The rocket, dubbed Naro, was scheduled for the third and final launch attempt at a space center in Goheung, South Jeolla Province, between 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Friday. An official of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology told reporters, “The launch has been postponed as a leak was found in the part connecting the rocket and launch pad while injecting Helium gas this morning.”

Scott Smith, a nutritionist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, knows exactly what he’d like to bring back from space — astronauts’ urine. Unraveling the mysterious impacts of microgravity on the human body takes careful and repeated analysis of urine, blood and other scientific samples, most of which have been stranded aboard the International Space (ISS) Station for more than a year.

25 October

The upper stage of a failed Russian launch earlier this year has exploded, creating hundreds of fragments that could exacerbate space debris concerns. The Breeze M upper stage exploded on October 16 while in an elliptical orbit of approximately 266 by 5,000 kilometers. the stage had been stranded in that orbit since August, when the stage failed during the third of four planned engine firings designed to place the two satellites it was carrying into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The explosion, likely caused when its nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine propellants came into contact with each other, created more than 500 pieces of debris that are currently being tracked by the US Space Surveillance Network, with potentially many more smaller items.

Under the deft command of cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, the Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft – bearing himself, fellow Russian Yevgeni Tarelkin and NASA astronaut Kevin Ford – has successfully arrived at the International Space Station. The trio docked at the ‘zenith’ (space-facing) Poisk module at 7:29 CDT this morning, two days after their launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

24 October

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) during the mission’s 78th sol (Oct. 24, 2012) to view soil material on the rover’s observation tray. The observations will help assess movement of the sample on the tray in response to vibrations from sample-delivery and sample-processing activities of mechanisms on the rover’s arm.

23 October

The Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft, carrying Oleg Novitskiy, the Soyuz commander, Evgeni Tarelkin and NASA’s Kevin Ford, sped toward an early 25 October docking with the International Space Station and a planned five month stay, following a trouble-free lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Liftoff was at 3:51 AM Phoenix time (10:51 UTC) from pad 31 at the Baikonur facility.

Both the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion crew capsule have continued their wind tunnel testing this month, with the Block 1 Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle (HLV) – otherwise known as the SLS-1000x – set to facilitate a complete aerodynamic force and moment database delivery by the end of this year.

22 October

The ongoing investigation into a problem with an upper stage engine (RL10) on a recent launch will delay the next launch of the military’s secretive X-37B spaceplane until next month, United Launch Alliance announced late Friday. The Air Force had planned to launch the X-37B on the Orbital Test Vehicle 3 (OTV-3) mission this month on an Atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral.

A few weeks ago, SpaceX took the first step towards its reusable launch vehicle with a demonstration flight of its Grasshopper. The Grasshopper is the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket with spindly legs — hence the insect-inspired name — that can launch, hover, and land vertically on its own.

21 October

A Russian-made Soyuz rocket was erected into place Sunday, ahead of the start of a mission to take a three-man crew to the International Space Station. For the first time since 1984, the manned launch will take place from Baikonur cosmodrome launch pad 31, while the pad that is normally used, from which Yuri Gagarin began his landmark space mission, is undergoing modernization.

20 October

It’s been fifteen years since Cassini launched to Saturn. A joint program with the European Space Agency and the Italian space agency, the Cassini-Huygens mission left Earth on October 15, 1997. It flew by Venus twice, swung back by Earth, then went onward to Jupiter before settling in around Saturn in 2004; the Huygens probe landed onto the surface of Titan in 2005. In all, the spacecraft covered more than 3.8 billion miles on the seven year journey, and has spent the last eight years returning stunning images of, and incredible science from, the ringed planet and its moons.

19 October

Fans of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program will have their last opportunity to see an orbiter on the move when Atlantis makes its historic final journey on 2 November at Kennedy Space Center. Atlantis will travel the nearly 10 miles from Kennedy Space Center to its new home at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is behaving well – bar a couple of minor issues – during its berthed phase of the CRS-1 (SpX-1) mission, as it closes in on its departure at the end of the month. The unberthing will be conducted by the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), which translated away from the Dragon to allow for an inspection this week.

18 October

Astronomers just keep finding more moons around Pluto. They scoped out the first and largest, Charon, in 1976; the fifth, tiny P5, was spotted just this summer by the Hubble Space Telescope. But finding new moons and other stuff floating around in the outer solar system may create headaches for the team operating NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft for the space agency’s mission to Pluto.

The annual Orionid meteor shower peaks over several nights close to October 20-22, which is favourable for this coming weekend. The shower is a result of debris shed by Halley’s comet in its 75 year journey around the Sun.

17 October

An Earth-sized planet has been discovered circling a star in the system, just 4.4 light-years away (Alpha Centauri B). The planet’s mass is similar to Earth’s, but its orbit is not. Tucked in close to its star — 25 times closer than the Earth is to the sun — the planet is likely a roasted world incapable of hosting life.

Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company founded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, is making progress towards orbital launches. Earlier this month, the company successfully fired the thrust chamber assembly for its new 100,000 pound thrust BE-3 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen rocket engine.

After issuing an international call for tenders, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has chosen Arianespace to launch the GSAT 7 and INSAT 3D satellites. The contract also includes two more launch options for ISRO, the Indian space agency.

16 October

United Launch Alliance (ULA) has completed the “Hazard, System Safety and Probabilistic Risk Assessment” for launching crewed vehicles aboard its Atlas rocket. This was the fifth and final milestone of its current Space Act Agreement with NASA. Sierra Nevada (Dream Chaser) and Boeing (CST-100) plan to use the Atlas as their launcher.

A new radar designed to test methods for finding orbital debris that can be hazardous to space navigation has been installed in Spain. The radar will be used to develop future debris warning services, helping boost safety for European satellite operators.

15 October

The space shuttle Endeavour completed a 20-kilometer trek across the city of Los Angeles on Sunday, arriving at the museum that will be its permanent home. Endeavour arrived at the California Science Center, near the campus of the University of Southern California south of downtown Los Angeles, Sunday afternoon, two and a half days after leaving a hangar at Los Angeles International Airport, where it arrived on its 747 carrier aircraft last month. The journey across city streets took nearly a day longer than originally planned as crews maneuvered the orbiter around light poles and trees. Endeavour will go on temporary display in a hangar at the museum while a permanent building to host the orbiter is built.

14 October

International Launch Services (ILS) have launched their Proton-M rocket in a daylight launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Launch was on schedule at 8:37 am GMT, with the Proton’s Briz-M (Breeze-M) Upper Stage now tasked with deploying the large telecommunications satellite (Intelsat 23) into its desired orbit, after nine hours of flight.

A Chinese rocket placed a pair of technology demonstration satellites into orbit on Sunday. The Long March 2C lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center at 11:25 pm EDT Saturday (0325 GMT, 11:25 am Beijing time Sunday) and placed the Shijian 9A and 9B satellites into a near-polar orbit. The satellites, according to Chinese media, will be used to test technologies for future missions as well as demonstrate “inter-satellite measurement.”

13 October

One day down, one more to go in space shuttle Endeavour’s surreal trek through Los Angeles, a scene attracting thousands of spectators young and old along city sidewalks.

A joint SpaceX and NASA team will investigate the early shutdown of a Falcon 9 rocket engine during Sunday’s launch from Cape Canaveral.

12 October

On Friday, October 12, at 3:15 pm local time, Arianespace successfully carried out the third launch of the Soyuz rocket from the Guiana Space Center (CSG) in French Guiana, orbiting two more satellites in the Galileo constellation.

As far as errant chunks of space rock go, this one’s a tiddler. But this particular asteroid — called 2012 TC4 — is going to fly past the Earth at a distance of only 95,000 kilometers (59,000 miles), or one-quarter the Earth-moon distance. As far as near-misses go, that’s the outer edge of the bulls-eye.

Jake Matijevic, a seemingly innocuous chuck of igneous rock (meaning rock that solidified from a molten liquid) sitting on the surface of Mars inside Gale Crater, sits where NASA’s rover Curiosity landed two months ago. The football-sized rock, named after a well-respected Mars rover engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who died in August, was the first good target scientists found for Curiosity to zap with its laser. So for a couple of days last month, fire away the rover did, pulverizing bits of dust and rock to expose what lies within. Scientists expected the rock would be similar to igneous rocks studied by previous Mars rovers elsewhere on the planet. Instead, they discovered a rock that is much more chemically similar to an unusual, but well-studied type of rock on Earth that is found on islands like Hawaii and in continental rift zones like the Rio Grande, which extends from southern Colorado to Chihuahua, Mexico.

11 October

Singer Sarah Brightman will travel to the International Space Station as a space tourist, she and Space Adventures announced on Wednesday. Brightman will take a 10-day trip to the ISS at an unspecified future date, most likely 2015, when seats will be available on Soyuz spacecraft traveling to and from the station. Brightman has partnered with UNESCO to support its mission to “promote peace and sustainable development”; those activities are expected to include a singing performance of some kind while on the station.

Earth has a familiar magnetic field, and little Mercury has an oddly strong one, but could a chunk of rock as small as an asteroid (Vesta) ever have had a magnetic field spawned by the churnings of its own molten metal core? Theorists have had their doubts because the smaller the core, the faster the churning must be. But now, scientists studying a meteorite in the lab report having found signs that the tiny core of the asteroid Vesta once churned hard enough to create a magnetic field. The discovery would give theorists a much-needed, extreme example of a dynamo to ponder.

10 October

At 3:56 AM Pacific Daylight time, Wednesday 10 October, the SpaceX Dragon space craft was successfully grappled by the Canadarm on the International Space Station (ISS). Referring to the fact that Dragon is capable of carrying powered equipment to and from the space station, the space station crew reported that they had captured Dragon and were looking forward to the chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream in the freezer aboard the space craft.

The Mars rover Curiosity has scooped up its first soil. A small bright object was spotted laying on the ground. Speculation is that it is a piece of the rover.

Aviation Week discusses the CRS-1 launch and the insertion of the secondary Orbcomm prototype OG2 communications satellite into an orbit lower than planned.

8 October

A SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully placed a Dragon cargo spacecraft into orbit Sunday night despite an anomaly with one of the rocket’s engines. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 8:35 pm EDT Sunday (0035 GMT Monday) and placed a Dragon spacecraft into its planned orbit. Dragon is flying a mission designated CRS-1, the first of twelve commercial resupply missions NASA has contracted with SpaceX.

At 80 seconds into the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9, an “anomaly” occurred. Speculation is the #1 engine suffered an explosion. See the video here.

7 October

A Dragon spacecraft loaded with nearly a ton of equipment and supplies is cleared to launch Sunday night. The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 5:35 pm Phoenix time Sunday (0035 UTC Monday) in an instantaneous launch window. There are no technical issues with the launch and forecasts call for a 60% chance of acceptable weather at launch time. Dragon is flying a mission designated CRS-1, the first of twelve commercial resupply missions NASA has contracted with SpaceX.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) confirmed late Friday that there was a problem with the upper-stage engine during Thursday’s launch of a GPS satellite on a Delta 4 rocket. According to ULA, launch controllers noticed an “unexpected data signature” in the performance of the RL10 engine that powers the Delta’s upper stage. The unidentified problem caused reduced thrust levels from the engine, but the upper stage was still able to release its payload, the GPS 2F-3 satellite, into the proper orbit because of design margins and propellant reserves.

6 October

Virgin Galactic, the world’s first commercial spaceline, today announced that it has taken 100% ownership of its sister company, The Spaceship Company (TSC), by acquiring the 30% stake held by Scaled Composites (Scaled) since TSC’s formation under a joint venture with Virgin Galactic.

This week, the first stage of Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket, the biggest rocket ever to launch from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore, rolled out onto its new $145 million launchpad.

5 October

WhiteKnightTwo made its 100th flight, solo, on Thursday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. It was at least the third such flight within the past nine days. The 100th flight took place on Oct. 4, the eighth anniversary of SpaceShipOne winning the Ansari X Prize and the 55th anniversary of Sputnik 1. No manned ship has been in suborbital space since that day in 2004.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne and the Japan Aerospace and Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Tokyo announced this week that they have formalized a deal to send the German-built Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout, or MASCOT, on the Hayabusa 2 mission, set to launch in 2014.

4 October

The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) has awarded the 2012 Laurels for Team Achievement Award to the MESSENGER team. The award was presented September 30 at the opening ceremony of the 63rd International Astronautical Congress, which is being held this week in Naples.

The U.S. Air Force successfully launched a United Launch Alliance Delta IV-Medium rocket carrying the third Global Positioning System IIF satellite at 8:10 a.m. EDT today from Space Launch Complex 37 here.

3 October

The orbit raising manoeuvres of GSAT-10 satellite have been successfully completed from ISRO’s Master Control Facility, Hassan. The third and final orbit raising manoeuvre was performed this morning (October 03, 2012) to place the GSAT-10 in an orbit with 35,734 km apogee (farthest point to earth), 35,585 km perigee (nearest point to earth) and an inclination of 0.172 degree with respect to the equator.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that their Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV)-3 unmanned cargo vehicle re-entered Earth’s atmosphere early Oct. 3 and broke apart in a predetermined uninhabited corridor over the southern Pacific Ocean.

2 October

The State of Virginia has finished construction on the Wallops Island, Virginia launch pad for Orbital Sciences’ Antares launch vehicle. The pad has officially been turned over to Orbital Sciences, allowing the company to begin launch operations.

1 October

The twin Galileo satellites are now fully fueled and mated together atop the upper stage that will haul them most of the way up to their final orbit. The launch is now planned for the evening of 12 October.